MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present Content-Aware, the first solo exhibition of Miao Ying at the gallery. Curated by Michael Connor, the exhibition will showcase a series of Miao Ying’s latest works created in 2016.

“Photoshop is going to look at your photo, and it’s going to decide what it thinks should be in the area that you’re filling, and the results are sometimes pretty surprising.”
——A Homemade Video Tutorial for the ‘Content-Aware Tool’ on Youtube

Miao Ying’s exhibition Content-Aware takes the eponymous technology as the jumping-off point for an exploration of a visual culture in which images are produced hastily, without much regard for traditional ideas of taste or quality, in order to serve some immediate, temporary purpose.

Meanwhile, this exhibition comes in the wake of an enormous wave of interest in “postinternet” art in exhibitions and fairs around the world. Though the term’s definition is contested, postinternet artists often responded to and narrated the cultural and societal effects of internet saturation, particularly in the US and Europe. Postinternet art became associated with commercial aesthetics and slick photographic documentation circulated online. In place of this slickness and futurity, Miao’s exhibition offers a sub-amateurism, and demands that it be understood as a set of new and evolving aesthetic conventions rather than their absence.

Several works in this exhibition involve certain “dummy features” in both professional graphic editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, and more user friendly photo editing apps like MeituPic which, according to the artist, can be considered as a great example of the notion of “sub-amateurism”. In respond to the current situation where social media entirely pervaded our daily life, and related technical skill requirements are constantly lowered, the term “Practical/Half-Assed Aesthetics” is introduced by the artist to describe an extreme internet pragmatism in which functionality is the sole decisive force, as well as to catalyze a new type of aesthetics formed by the lack of aesthetics.